Blog is all about words because they matter, they influence, they entertain and when you put them down on a page in a meaningful order, they acquire permanence. Contained here are a bunch of written words in the form of book reviews, magazine and web article links & summaries and other stuff I like to write about. Currently aiming to read and write on two books a month.

Sunday, January 30, 2011

Joe Posnanski on Words

I like words.

Yea... that's a highly simplistic statement to make, but a very material one as it's the whole point of this blog. From the front page...

Blog is all about words because... they matter, they influence, they entertain and when you take 'em and put them down on a page in a meaningful order, they acquire permanence.

While the majority of posts here are done as vehicles linking to great writing, I've also done a handful of entries on the creation of said writing (posts having the blog label "writing" and the most recent linked to here).

This being said, I felt a bit like kid in a candy store upon seeing a blog post on writing from one of my favorite writers. "The Most Beautiful Word" by Joe Posnaski takes the oft-asked question of how he became a writer and answers it by telling a story about his youth, parents, and how he was raised. Specifically, Posnanski makes reference to his mother asking him "do you know what word is beautiful?"

Posnanski wrote of this question's impact on an elementary school aged kid...

"Something kind of clicked with me, I think; it was a whole other way of looking at words. And over time I would start to think about that, how words sound together, how the pacing of language and how the velocity and tempo can create layers of meaning, the staggering power of the simplest words."Hey, that's kind of how I describe words and why I like them!

-----

On the subjects: of Posnanski writing, mothers, and words organized into meaningful prose was a feature on Tony Pena... originally written in 2003 and then linked to after Pena's mother passed away last week.